FOAM PARTY McKellar, Acker, Kristyn Green and Chasez just wanna have fun.

“This is the way it was,” a title card claims, so let’s give 21 and a Wakeup the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Vietnam really was fought by hot nurses who spent their tours of duty donning bikinis and having poolside conversations about marrying personal-injury lawyers. Perhaps Vietnamese residents really did offer expository colonial histories at the drop of a hat. It’s certainly possible that the entire military resembled the cast of Baywatch; in any case, nothing about the soundtrack or costume design remotely suggests 1971. When our star-doctor hero (Acker) wants to get the attention of the major (Dunaway), she throws a potted plant through her office window, then opens the door.

Anyone looking for the second coming of M*A*S*H will be out of luck. But those searching for the next incarnation of The Room will be bowled over by the thoroughness of the ineptitude here. The surgery scenes alone are an astonishing frontier in hysterics, but they’re topped by the closing standoff, which features the longest-deferred grenade explosion in the history of cinema. The production notes make a big deal of actually filming in Vietnam, noting that this is “what life was really like on a vast Vietnam military base that had swimming pools, nightclubs, banks and massage parlors.” You could shoot this movie with a camcorder at a Florida racquet club and it would make no difference.

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